Angel Unchained

Released in 1970, "Angel Unchained" features Don Stroud as an Arizona biker who decides he's had enough of the biker lifestyle. He roams off and ends up at a hippie commune where he hooks up with a young Tyne Daly. It doesn't take long for redneck cowboy dune buggy riders to enter the picture (I'm not making this up). They try to chase the hippies away so Stroud goes back to his biker buddies to enlist them to help stave off the rednecks.

"Angel Unchained" is definitely a low Grade "B" flick. You'll observe this right off at the silly carnival brawl sequence. This is not top-notch filmmaking, that's for sure. Despite this, after about 30-40 minutes I strangely started getting involved in the story; I actually started caring about the characters and what would ultimately happen, even though I shouldn't have. The bikers are depicted as wild outcast revelers who drink and use drugs, but they're generally likable at the same time. The scenic Arizona locations are a highlight.

The end credits showcase each actor individually in that dramatic way that used to be popular (e.g. "The Dirty Dozen"); all it did for me was make me bust out laughing. NOTE TO THE FILMMAKERS: It wasn't a good or serious enough film to warrant this type of venerable closing.

BOTTOM LINE: "Angel Unchained" wasn't made very well or very seriously; however, if you make the necessary psychological adjustments and give it a chance (i.e. 30-40 minutes of your time), it's fun, likable, entertaining and even a mite engrossing. I shouldn't like it, but I do. Go figure.

The film runs 86 minutes.

Grade: C+

PS: If you want to see a great late 60's/early 70's biker flick, catch the very first one, the infamous "The Wild Angels" from 1966 starring Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Nancey Sinatra and Diane Ladd. "The Wild Angels" is simultaneously shocking and profoundly brilliant (yes, even though it's essentially a Roger Corman 'B' film). See my review for full details.

Angel (surfer Don Stroud, "The Amityville Horror") is a biker who joins a commune of hippies near a small town. When the town rednecks attack them, Angel calls up some of his bad biker buddies to exact revenge.

This is more or less exactly what you would expect from a movie that combines hippies with bikers. They simply do not get along well, despite both of them being anti-establishment and pro-drug. (We saw a similar yet different encounter in "Easy Rider".)

Was this a good film? Maybe. I mean, I am not going to go out and tell people to watch it. But as far as some good old-fashioned American International Pictures fun goes, this is another AIP film that you can just relax to. No thinking involved.

Angel Unchained tells the story of Angel, the loner who leaves his club for the hippy commune. Local townies (actually cowboys in dune buggies) are out to drive the long hairs away, so Angel asks his biker buddies for protection. It's The Seven Samurai on choppers, but these warriors aren't in it for honour, money, or prestige...they only want the potent 'wammo' that the hippie's medicine man puts into chocolate chip cookies(presumably it's Peyote, but the script takes care not to be too descriptive). Acting honours go to Don Stroud as Angel, there's a young Tyne Daly on hand to 'do her thing', Luke Askew is good as commune leader Tremaine, and Aldo Ray has about five minutes of screen time--most of it reclining in a chair--as the local sheriff. Plenty of action, and a lot less profanity and nudity than you would expect from one of these AIP quickies.

Angel Unchained has the ingredients of your basic AIP picture- bikers, 'cowboys' (rednecks), hippies, and lots of action. Unfortunately, it isn't entirely synthesized. Perhaps I could've known this by seeing it had been re-rated a PG-13 by the MPAA, but I also thought 'hosh-posh, it still probably has that real violent, grungy feel of dueling off between the forces of hicks and bikers'. Turns out the cooler elements of the film, some of which are some of the more amusing and awesomely bad moments from AIP biker movies, are juxtaposed against a core of a story that's kind of tame, even soft. It's actually got a Seven Samurai-style story to it, with the roles of the bandits and samurai reversed here- this time it's the so-called bandits (bikers) fighting off against the good-old boys (cowboys). This starts off some interest even as knock-off material.

The acting as well is not that terrible, at least for what's required on such an ultra-low budget. Regulars like Don Stroud and Luke Askew are dependable (more so Askew who the year before had a memorable role in Easy Rider), though Tyne Daly, a strange early part for her before The Enforcer and later Judging Amy, keeps the love story a little too mellow for its own good. Angel (Stroud) wants to get away just for a little while from his old gang, so he hooks up with Daly's character and starts working at a commune/farm, complete with dazed bearded help and a token Native American with a special 'mix' of cookies. But as they get terrorized by cowboys on go-carts (yes, go-carts, one of the real highlights of the movie), Angel enlists the help of his biker gang, with some consequences that unfold. All of this is tricky material, and the co-writer/director Lee Madden isn't totally able to balance out the scenes and moments (and just visual sights like with Bill McKinney's retro glasses) with the sappier parts. The latter of which also includes a soundtrack that borders on soft-rock, the specifically wrong tone that suddenly makes the material quite dated.

So, if you're looking for lots of carnage, immoral action, and the stomping out of almost everything in sight, you might be disappointed. Even as there is a neat B-movie style climax involving go-carts vs. bikers that does garner up excitement and laughs, the very end adds a point to what ends up being the lesser qualities of the film. It's intentions are swell, but it gets confused as whether it should be more hippie or biker style, with the poor Injun (yes, that's his character name) caught in the middle. Worth watching once, especially for genre fans, but not top-shelf AIP material.

obviously "biker gang" and "hippie commune" are terms of pure fantasy ... the fantasy of enjoyment that the workaday world had about '60s subculture. so this film is mildly interesting in that it manages to represent both with (what I imagine to be) some degree of accuracy. bikers, with the promise of extra enjoyment, act as enforcers for peace-loving back-to-the-landers against hostile hick "townies" who harass them at every opportunity. it is a bucketful of cliché and ends in a big dune-buggy hack-em-wack-em fireball, but there's some meaningful representation of (what I imagine to be) the cultural conflicts of the era.